Evelyn is always searching; moving through worlds, possibilities, fragments of herself – seeking unity, coherence, and meaning. She wanders across infinite versions of her life, hoping for an answer, a grounding. Yet she finds herself returning to the only place she can truly grasp.
Everything: Chaos
The world unfolds in an intricate structure, a delicate chaos that both surrounds and contains me. When standing before the mirror, a question emerges: “Is this really me?” The reflection seems convincing, yet it cannot be what I truly am. That image is merely the self as it appears, a perception constructed within the mind. What lies beyond the mirror remains hidden, an unknowable reality that grounds every appearance.
The chaos of the world – everything perceived – holds no meaning on its own. Trees, birds, people, even the self: all gain significance only through the mind that perceives them. Likewise, yesterday, today, tomorrow – every event draws its meaning from within consciousness. Then there must be something that enables the mind to bring order to this chaos, to weave scattered sensations into a coherent whole. The entire process, beginning with sensible experience, finds completion in the mind, where meaning takes form. The world, as perceived, is thus a gift of the mind.
Evelyn, the protagonist in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), begins to encounter with countless universes, each revealing a different version of herself. These universes can be seen not as phenomenal, but as noumenal realms – unreachable realities that exist beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Evelyn can glimpse them, even sense their presence, yet she can never truly remain within them. They are worlds in themselves, inaccessible and fleeting. Evelyn can conceive that such a reality must exist; there must be something in itself, yet she can never truly grasp it – she does not belong to that realm. What she ultimately returns to is her own world, the only phenomenal realm where meaning and value can take shape. Evelyn’s journey mirrors Kant’s insight that while the noumenal world may exist beyond our grasp, the phenomenal world remains the sole space in which life, meaning, significance, and love become possible.
“Maybe there is something out there, some new discovery, that’ll make us feel even smaller… Something which explains… Why?”
“I will cherish these few specks of time” (Scheinert, 2022).
Things in themselves, the absolute reality she can never know... Just as the parts of Evelyn that she is not, the lives she does not live, remain silently behind the one she inhabits, the noumenal reality, too, stands behind the phenomenal – an unseen ground that makes her world possible. The only reality available to experience is the one that appears, the only world in which meaning can take shape, and within that fragile, limited horizon lies the only truth she can cherish.
Everywhere: Space and Time
This “chaos”, for us, is not chaos at all. The mind is perfectly capable of gathering together distinct sensible qualities. For Kant, the answer lies in the forms of sensible intuition: space and time. (CPR, A22/B36; A33/B49)
Space is not something I derive from experience, nor something that comes to me from outside. Rather, it must already be presupposed as a condition for the possibility of experience itself. Space is the necessary, a priori condition of my reality. It is a condition that makes appearances possible yet is not dependent on them, nor is it composed of them. It is the underlying necessary condition of all of my outer experiences: Space is something that my mind intuitively, wholly applies to all external phenomena. Essentially, space and time are the intuitions that contains numerous moments. Still, space and time have only phenomenal reality, not transcendental reality. They are the subjective condition of sensibility, the condition of how things appear to me, not things that actually are in themselves. When I see a tree, I do not perceive scattered patches of green and brown; space serves as the form that binds these qualities into a single coherent intuition.
Time, the other form of intuition, underlies all my inner and outer experiences. It is what makes my experiences mine; that which happens to me must occur in time. My ability to sequence events, distinguish before and after, and understand change and continuity only through an a priori temporal structure that remains infinite, continuous, and necessary.
Space and time, therefore, are the very realities of my mind, necessary forms that surround all my possible experiences, and through their presuppositions, make my entire life possible. I exist within them as a fish in an endless ocean, swimming through this reality, moving through their horizon.
In the film, the character Jobu Tupaki embodies a kind of transcendence of Kantian necessary forms, transcendence so drastic that it exposes just how inseparable such necessities are from natural human life. Jobu Tupaki is capable of experiencing everything all at once, and this forces them to exist within a state of sheer chaos – a state that defies any conventional structure. For them, there is no before or after; everything can erupt at any moment, in any place, without any sequence or order; they can exist everywhere and at any time. This transhuman capacity transcends the very concepts of space and time, the indispensable forms through which the human mind organizes experience. Consequently, Jobu’s experience stands as a contrast to the boundaries of human experience as Kant conceives it.
What makes experience uniquely human, what keeps it within the boundaries of the phenomenal world, is the structuring of space and time. These necessary, perpetual and a priori structures are what make the only realm we can inhabit possible for us. Evelyn’s life, every fragment to which she is bound through her finite and linear perception, gestures toward Kant’s domain of the experienceable realm. It is within this realm, limited though it may be, that the experience can emerge at all.
All At Once: Synthesis
The entire process of meaning-making in my mind remains incomplete without something – that something is such that, without it, nothing can achieve its meaning. My sensibility provides the content for my experiences, and for me to make sense of this content with the inherent structures of space and time in my mind. However, my mind does not simply and passively perceive this content or matter in a holistic manner; it does not and cannot solely intuit it and toss it aside. It necessarily allocates meaning to it. It is not just intuition but also thought that shapes my experience.
When I see a tree, I do not just perceive its empirical qualities. I recognize it as a tree because the intuition aligns with a concept already present in my mind. I distinguish objects and events, sequence them, and relate cause to effect, always by applying a priori concepts that structure my experience.
Kant writes, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Smith, 2008, p. 93). Without content, concepts would be empty possibilities. It would be like knowing how to make a bagel without having any ingredients. Without concepts, intuitions would be chaotic, like having all ingredients but no recipe, leaving them meaningless, scattered.
In the film, the character Waymond places googly eyes on inanimate objects. This serves as a subtle symbol of Kant’s synthesis of intuition and concept. Waymond’s whimsical habit bestows meaning upon objects that simply exist, allowing him to construct his own experiential world. His capacity to conceptualize challenges the meaninglessness, granting significance.
“There is always something to love… even in this stupid universe” (Scheinert, 2022).
Evelyn is always searching; moving through worlds, possibilities, fragments of herself – seeking unity, coherence, and meaning. She wanders across infinite versions of her life, hoping for an answer, a grounding. Yet she finds herself returning to the only place she can truly grasp, the world as it has always appeared to her, the singular reality in which her experience can settle.
What she returns to is not a transcendent realm she can never know, but this one, this fragile, structured, perceptible life in which meaning actually becomes possible. The world she inhabits with the people she loves, within the limits she cannot cross. This phenomenal world is the only ground where her whole life is molded.
This is a life,
And within it, she finds enough.
References:
[CPR] Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. In Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511804649
Scheinert, D., & Kwan, D. (Directors). (2022). Everything everywhere all at once [Film]. A24.
Smith, N. K. (2008). Immanuel Kant's critique of pure reason. Read Books.
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